


Garden Eyed Girl

by elisabethdarling



Category: Christian Bible, Christian Lore, Christian Mythology - Fandom
Genre: F/M, Gen, Immortal Angst, Obsession, Unrequited Love, angel in love with a human girl, no one asked for this yet here it is
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-29
Updated: 2017-12-29
Packaged: 2019-02-23 12:58:51
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,400
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13190589
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/elisabethdarling/pseuds/elisabethdarling
Summary: “You love her.” Michael accuses and the breath gets caught in his throat. No, he wants to say, no I’m only a messenger I don’t—But he is, oh he is.





	Garden Eyed Girl

**Author's Note:**

> Gabriel: In Abrahamic religions, he is an archangel who typically serves as God's messenger. Patron Saint of prophets and messengers. 
> 
> Miryam of Nazareth: Mary, Maria, Marie, Maryam, Mariam, Star of the Sea, Queen of Heaven, Theotokos, Panagia, Ever-Virgin, Most Holy, Most Pure, Cause of Our Salvation. Cause of Our Joy. Mother of Jesus. 
> 
> Uriel: "God is my light." Serves as the eyes of god. Guards the entrance to Eden with a sword of fire.
> 
> Michael: Prince of Heaven. God's soldier. Patron Saint of chivalry and military.
> 
> Joseph: Carpenter. Future spouse of Miryam. Patron Saint of husbands, families, and departing souls.

i.

Gabriel first sees Miryam when she is stumbling out of her home in the pale dawn, fetching water for her mother. Her face is obscured by a sun-bleached scarf. She is young and lithe—a child.

 

ii.  
  
Uriel sits just outside of Eden, his sword of fire a dull light. The days of standing are gone. The way to the gates was forgotten long ago.

The vegetation grows uninhibited and lush against the immortal walls that separate Earth from paradise. The floor is soft and sweet with fallen fruit. Spring blooms arrogant and endless. There was a time when walking through its dense forest did not mean death. That time is gone. So much is gone. No one comes to the garden any more. No one begs for entry.

Gabriel goes to him often, not always with a message, but with a fig or a joke. This time he brings a pomegranate.

“She looks like Chava.” Uriel bypasses a greeting as he accepts the fruit. Gabriel knows instantly who he is referring to. Uriel is a prolific gossip. He has an ear and eye on every story—even ones he’s not supposed to know about.

“Does she?” Gabriel asks in a distant voice, as if tender-tongued Eve never passes his mind. Feral-eyed-Eve who always had her fingers dipped in honey and whose laughter sounded like crashing waves.

Uriel grins, it is bitter, and his dark wings shift as he looks at Gabriel. “Shouldn’t she?” He splits the fruit in half and hands one side to his brother.

 _No._ Gabriel thinks as he frowns. He looks to the barren lands west of the garden and sees the round-bellied sun sink into the red horizon.

“What’s her name again?” Uriel asks blinking his many gleaming eyes.

“Miryam of Nazareth.”

“Miryam of Nazareth.” Uriel repeats and pauses for a moment. Tasting her name on the tip of his tongue. He smiles and it is hollow. “Doesn’t sound anything like Eve of Eden, I suppose.”

 _You know it does._ Gabriel wants to lash out. He forgets, sometimes, Uriel is cruel like Lucifer. He is too much salt, too much like Sodom’s pillars, too much like an empty Eden, like an abandoned place.

“This is why no one comes to visit you.”

 

iii.

He’d envisioned her a wide-hipped holy woman, passive faced and serene like the naiads the Athenians had painted on their pottery. For the grandness of her fate he thought she ought to be the pure princess daughter of a cruel pagan King or at least the child of a wealthy merchant clothed in blue veils and white drapery. He had expected at the very least something to indicate her sinless birth—a feat never before managed by those born from human bodies.

But she had _dirt_ on her nose and she _stumbled._ She didn’t carry the air of a creature touched by Him. Miryam of Nazareth is just a girl.

 _No._ He pleads silently to no one. _Not her._ She has soft garden eyes and she laughs like the sea. Miryam of Joy. Miryam of Hope. Miryam, a girl, sick with messiah.

His message felt profane.

 

iv.  
  
“You think to highly of them.” Michael says as they walk along a pathway lit by stars. Gabriel keeps his head down and refuses to make eye contact.

“And you think to low.”

They pause for a moment and look down at the land beneath them. It is dark but the ground is littered with soft orange lights. Michael’s lip curls with thinly veiled contempt and he stands even more rigidly than usual.

Michael is a soldier like Uriel. Like himself. Like all of his brothers and sisters. War tore into them like a hungry animal. He’d never seen blood until Michael came to him covered in it, and Lucifer was gone, and he had to rally his brothers for battle because of it. And when they were in the thick of it—when Gabriel wept for his fallen friends and foes (all family, all known to him), when he thought Raphael dead and heaven lost—he looked to Michael and asked him, _"Why?"_

“Lucifer,” Michael’s gaze was fast upon the horizon, “His relentless desire. His terrible bleating heart. His— _unyielding_ perusal of _everything_ that was _never_ his fate to have.” Every word he said was strangled. Every part of him was broken. When beautiful Lucifer finally fell, it was Michael’s anguished attack that sent him fast and true into that pit no soul returns from.

Michael carries his broken parts differently than the others—like a prince solemn and proud. Gabriel remembers a time before Michael’s eyes were a noble veneer, when his older brother was golden and sweet as the sunrise. But that was before the war. Before Adam. Before Eve. And that time is gone.

“Perhaps.” Michael concedes. They do not speak. Gabriel feels distant. Most of his siblings do not understand his predilection towards humanity. That he was made from the same desires. To speak. To communicate. To be understood. He feels made _for_ them. For _her_.

Gabriel goes to leave but hesitates in his direction—Nazareth. Michael’s gaze is hot on his back. Gabriel has sense enough to look ashamed. He has been recluse as of late—no longer visiting Uriel at the garden or singing in the choir with his brothers and sisters as he was once wan to do. His mouth barely opens. He is restless. He does not eat. He is subsists on her name alone. _Miryam—_ a word that haunts his lips.

 _“Miryam.”_ He says it just before she loses her footing as she walks along a stone wall. She stills—the stillness saves her balance. Saves her skin. Saves her blood.

 _“Miryam!”_ He hears her mother call as the little maid feeds animals in the small barn. She looks up from her chores and smiles—her bright eyes crinkle. The little birds follow her foots steps as she moves by him, unnoticed, and into her family home.

“Oh, _Miryam_ is a funny girl.” The women who gather at the well say as they pull up their heavy buckets. The girl is behind them with a group of young friends speaking animatedly about an egg with two yolks her mother cracked open.

“Too loud if you ask me.” Another says has she grabs the pudgy arm of a child who has wandered to close to the open mouth of the well.

“No one did!” The first happily replies. Miryam’s laughter breaks through the busy chatter. Pieces of her dark hair tickle across her red mouth. Gabriel wants to be the wind brushing past her face.

“I’m going to marry _Miryam._ ” A carpenter boy nearly slams his hammer into his own thumb as she breezes past him with a beaming smile and a basket full of bread.

“You should leave her be,” Michael looks to Gabriel with weary eyes, “stop following her. She’s just a girl.”

Just a girl. Her hair is like a long dark river, the kind that cuts across the deserts and carries cool water to scorched and barren dunes. Just a girl. Her skin as warm as the golden sands. Just a girl. Small bodied and careless, he watched her run through tall reeds that slapped against her shins. She didn’t flinch at her welting skin or raised cuts. She laughed when the water hit her face and it was like—

 

v.  
  
He slips in through an open window as she rests upon her bed mat. Her hair is loose and freely curling around her body and spilling onto the blankets. She is bleary eyed in her night shift and a small sound escapes her yawning mouth.

The golden face of morning saturates the entire room and she glows like a pearl upon the gates of heaven. Is this idolatry? Is this sin? He slowly materializes in front of her widening eyes as a shimmering specter. Her dark eyes sparkle in his light. He breathes in.

_“Ave Maria.”_

 

vi.  
  
_“You love her.”_ Michael accuses and the breath gets caught in his throat. _No,_ he wants to say, _no I’m only a messenger I don’t—_

But he is, oh he is. She carries love in a vase to his mouth and he drinks it like a sweet blood sacrament.

 

vii.

Gabriel shudders to think of how the messiah’s face might echo her features.


End file.
